2018 The Future is Here
It’s my first meeting with Amber, and I am acting all grumpy. Amber seems up for it. I keep throwing sad lines at her, and each time, Amber finds something appropriate to say. She seems attentive. Smart. Friendly.
But as we chat on, she begins to sound a tad... businesslike. It could be her speed – Amber doesn’t meander – or her unflagging politeness, but I get the feeling that she doesn’t want to appear too friendly.
Twent-something Varun Puri, one … Twenty-something Varun Puri, one of Amber’s creators, says that’s by design. “We want Amber to make you comfortable enough to open up to her,” he says. “But we don’t want her to have too much personality.”
Not many seem to mind Amber’s muted personality. In just over a year, more than 30,000 employees at 37 companies have started confiding their deepest workplace secrets in her.
“In fact, some of them don’t even realize that Amber is not human,” Puri chuckles. “We have seen e-mails saying, ‘Amber hi, can we meet face to face?’”
Josh Bersin, founder and principal at Bersin by Deloitte, an HR research and advisory firm, is one of the world’s mostrevered voices on people management. In his HR predictions for 2018 , Bersin is gung-ho on the likes of Amber – an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot built by startup InFeedo, which helps CEOs keep track of the mood of employees in real time and take action before things get out of hand.
“For many years the focus on HR technology was online payroll, record-keeping, learning management etc.,” Bersin writes. But in 2018, “feedback, engagement, and analytics tools will reign.”
There is a reason for his bets. The office as we know it is falling apart. Workplace-solution provider Steelcase quizzed over 12,000 professionals in 17 countries on their workplace engagement levels. A measly 13 percent reported feeling “highly engaged and satisfied.”
This epidemic of disengagement isn’t a threat to only restless millennials. According to HR consultancy Aon Hewitt, key talent erosion in certain firms jumped from 7.3 percent in 2015 to 12.3 percent in 2016.
It’s the kind of stuff that can wreck balance sheets. Hay Group, another consulting firm, says unchecked erosion could rob a company of up to 4 percent of revenues and 40 percent of profits.
For Amber’s type, this is a massive opportunity. Puri, who built Amber along with college pal Tanmaya Jain, says their company today makes “over a score” in revenue. That’s chump change considering what’s possible: By some estimates, HR tech is a $400 billion industry globally. At about half a billion dollars, the HR tech industry in many countries is still in infancy.
The target segment of inFeedo, employee engagement, is the holy grail in this business. Worth nearly $75 billion, in the U.S. alone, this is the domain of hulking engagement assessment-cum- consulting firms such as Aon Hewitt, Great Place to Work and Gallup, and tech giants like IBM Watson. There’s also a rash of startups, such as Qualtrics valued at $2.5 billion.
In India, inFeedo is a pioneer, but it’s not alone. Minutes away from inFeedo’s office, Sarthak Saini, the 22-year-old chief product officer of ChatterOn, is finessing the company’s flagship chatbot Leena AI. ChatterOn started in 2015 as a chatbot development platform, where anyone could build a chatbot without having to write a single line of code.
“We licensed the platform to L&T Infotech, Videocon, etc., and realized they were using it mostly for HR purposes,” says Saini. “We launched Leena AI in June 2017.” Already, it has bagged blue-chip clients like Coca-Cola, KFC and HDFC Life.
How does a robot solve the employee disengagement problem? Let’s take Amber.
Typically, employees receive a mail from the CEO introducing Amber as their new “personal assistant”. Thereafter, they get a mail with a link to access Amber at pre-decided intervals. The questions change as the employee’s maturity in the organization increases. As more people interact with Amber, she learns to ask more intelligent questions and “figure out what you are hiding from her,” says Akshay Khetrapal, marketing consultant at inFeedo.
“Our research shows that people consider leaving a company when they hit a milestone,” Puri adds. Think of a work anniversary. “So Amber will reach out to the employee on the day… and ask them, ‘Hey, how’s this year been for you?’” Saini says Leena AI gets activated on important personal milestones too, such as when a person gets married or has a baby.
The world of the office has since changed, and it’s changing a lot still. And the office is only the beginning. There’s no stopping it – the future has come, and it’s only a matter of time until robotics will become a necessary component of the day-to-day lives of humans.
For all intents and purposes, yes, the future is already here.
“Hello, I am Amber. So, how’s work?”
“UMM ... DIFFICULT :(“
“THAT DOESN’T SOUND GOOD. COULD YOU PLEASE HELP ME UNDERSTAND WHAT WENT WRONG?”
“I AM NEW IN THIS BIG COMPANY. I AM STRUGGLING TO ADJUST.”
“THANKS, I NOW UNDERSTAND BETTER ...”